Tuesday, November 15, 2011

Octophile: Social media widgets for GitHub

Last week I put one of those Twitter follow buttons on my blog. It was cool, but it looked a little lonely all by itself. It occurred to me that other developers can follow me on GitHub too, so I started looking for a similar button for GitHub. Much to my surprise, I was not able to find one. Luckily, GitHub has a pretty awesome API, so I decided to try to make a follow button for GitHub myself. I cobbled together a small sinatra application, pushed it to heroku, and octophile.com was born!

You can see the GitHub follow button in action off to the right (if you are reading this on my website and not a RSS reader). If you find this button useful, or would like to see some other widgets like this, I'd love to hear your feedback.

Happy coding!

Update 11/19/2011:
I have since found that something like this does already exist: github anywhere.